Burmese delusions
By Fred Hiatt
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON—Aung San Suu Kyi knows where she will be spending her 61st birthday next month.
       The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was due to be freed from house arrest two days ago. But despite a personal appeal from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a personal visit from Annan’s deputy, Burmese strongman Than Shwe instead extended her term of confinement.
       So Aung San Suu Kyi, sometimes called the Nelson Mandela of Asia, will mark her June 19 birthday alone, isolated from family and supporters as she has been for most of this decade and the last, in her decaying lakefront house at 54 University Avenue Road.
       Since she is totally cut off—the regime did not allow even her terminally ill husband to visit before he died in 1999—we have to imagine how she might respond to the latest injustice. A devout Buddhist, dedicated to nonviolence and forgiveness, an Oxford-educated mother who has given up everything for her country, Aung San Suu Kyi would probably counsel this: Don’t waste time thinking about me.
       Think, instead, of the political prisoners whom Than Shwe is holding in far worse conditions than mine, in Insein Prison and elsewhere—more than a thousand.
       Think of the peasants whom Than Shwe’s soldiers are raping, killing and evicting from burned fields and villages—more than 10,000, just in the past few months.
       And think with sympathy, not anger, about the UN leaders who once again allowed themselves to be deluded by a dictator, she might say. Think with clarity about what that means for next steps.
       Saturday, the day Aung San Suu Kyi should have been freed, was also the 16th anniversary of the election that should have made her prime minister. Her party, the National League for Democracy, won four out of five parliamentary seats. In power, it might have put Burma—a southeast Asian nation of 50 million people (about as many as Spain and Portugal combined)—on track to join the tiger economies of Asia, such as South Korea, in rising prosperity and democracy.
       But Burma’s military rulers never honored the election’s results. Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest even on election day, did not become prime minister. Many of those who should have sat in parliament went to prison instead. And Burma continued its long slide into destitution.
       Last fall two men who know something about peaceful transitions from dictatorship to democracy—retired archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and former President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic—urged the UN Security Council to help. They did not ask for military action or even for sanctions, only that the Security Council put Burma on its formal agenda and adopt a resolution instructing Annan to make it a top priority.
       Not too much to ask, you might think, of an organization that puffed up with pride a year ago over its newfound resolve that governments could no longer hide behind borders and claims of “sovereignty” if they were abusing their own people.
       Burma seemed the perfect test: Than Shwe’s ongoing campaign against the Karen nationality in the northeast hill country may well meet the UN definition of genocide.
       But the Security Council did not act. Instead, Annan sent Undersecretary General Ibrahim Gambari to Burma 10 days ago. Gambari emerged from his smiling photo session with the dictator to announce, without mentioning the ongoing ethnic cleansing, that the regime appeared ready “to turn a new page in relations with the international community.”
       Annan, visiting neighboring Thailand, chimed in: “I’m relying on you, General Than Shwe, to do the right thing.”
       Alas.
       Insiders speculate that Aung San Suu Kyi may have been presented with conditions for release that she would not accept—to overlook the ethnic cleansing of the minority Karen people, for example. It’s also possible that Than Shwe never intended to let her go.
       Either way, UN faith in the essential goodwill of ruling dictators, and in the power of perpetual talk over discomfiting action, has again been disappointed. Will the resulting embarrassment impel the Security Council actually to do something?
       Aung San Suu Kyi might have some useful advice on that score. Unfortunately, we can only imagine what it might be.
       Hiatt is The Washington Post’s editorial page editor